“Barney, I’m going to put the cuffs on you so that Sergeant Zerbrowski can put the cross away. Say something, Barney. I need to know you understand me.” I was kneeling beside him, but not close enough to touch him. It was still way too close if he went apeshit again, but someone was going to have to get that close and I’d picked me for the job. I couldn’t have stood there and watched while he hurt someone else, knowing that I’d given him the space to do it. Arrogance had made me uncuff him; guilt made me kneel there and try to get him to hear me.

There was movement behind us. I kept my attention on the vampire in the corner; I knew better than to look away from one danger to another. I trusted the other policemen to have my back. My world had narrowed down to the suspect in the corner. But Dolph spoke low to someone, and then he leaned over me and said, “We found the location, but we’ve lost contact with the first officers on sight.”

“Shit,” I whispered. It could be that the officers were having to stay off their radios to search for vampires, or they could be hurt, or dead, or hostages. We were out of time to mess with this vampire; others had our people. I needed him to hear me. I needed him to do what I wanted him to do. “Barney,” I said, “hear me.” And there was a thread of power in my voice now, a faint vibration of my necromancy. I was a vampire executioner as a job, but I’d started life raising zombies. My psychic gift was with the dead, or the undead. I hadn’t meant to, but my desire to control him had found a part of my own natural gifts that might do just that. Was it illegal to use psychic gifts on a suspect? Not after what he’d just done, and not with a fifteen-year-old girl maybe dying at this minute, and at least two officers gone into radio silence. We were out of time, and we needed any help he could give us. The law did allow for psychic force to be used if it would save lives, or if the suspect had proven uncooperative with more normal means. The same new laws that had made it so I couldn’t just shoot Barney also allowed me to do things that would have been iffy before they were in place. The law giveth, and the law taketh away.